From Metaphysics to Midrash

Myth, History, and the Interpretation of Scripture in Lurianic Kabbala

Shaul Magid

Publication Year: 2008

In From Metaphysics to Midrash, Shaul Magid explores the exegetical
tradition of Isaac Luria and his followers within the historical context in
16th-century Safed, a unique community that brought practitioners of Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam into close contact with one another. Luria's scripture
became a theater in which kabbalists redrew boundaries of difference in areas of
ethnicity, gender, and the human relation to the divine. Magid investigates how
cultural influences altered scriptural exegesis of Lurianic Kabbala in its
philosophical, hermeneutical, and historical perspectives. He suggests that Luria
and his followers were far from cloistered. They used their considerable skills to
weigh in on important matters of the day, offering, at times, some surprising
solutions to perennial theological problems.

Cover

Contents

Acknowledgments

The prehistory of this book began in 1982 in the Mekor Barukh neighbborhood
of Jerusalem. It was there, at Yeshivat ha-Hayyim ve ha-Shallom,
that I began attending the afternoon seminars or shiurim in Luriaanic
Kabbala (kitvei ARI) by the renowned Jerusalem kabbalist Ha-Rav
Mordechai Attia. ...

List of Abbreviations

Introduction Kabbala, New Historicism, and the Question of Boundaries

This is a book about the nexus between Kabbala (in particular Lurianic
Kabbala) and the interpretation of Scripture. More than that, it is a book
that views scriptural interpretation as literature, a series of texts that
emerge from the reading of other texts but that also stand alone as a testament to how a particular community understands itself, ...

The Lurianic Myth A Playbill

Is the Bible myth or “history”? Is Kabbala myth or symbol? More generally, is Judaism founded on myth and, if so, what does a Jewish myth look
like? These questions lie at the root of any serious engagement with classical Jewish texts and more so with kabbalistic sources that are wed to a
notion of understanding this world ...

In the history of Jewish interpretation of Scripture, the utility of the book
of Genesis is an ongoing question. The telos of Genesis is arguably the
covenant with Abraham (Gen. 12:2–3), descent of the tribe of Jacob into
Egypt (Gen. 42, 43) culminating in the birth of Moses and the Israelite
people in the opening chapters of Exodus. ...

This chapter focuses on the depiction of the biblical 'erev rav (“mixed multitude,” Exod. 12:38) in Hayyim Vital’s 'Etz ha-Da'at Tov (EDT) an
early commentary to the Torah written before his discipleship with Luria.
I argue that Vital’s idiosyncratic depiction of the 'erev rav in this early
work ...

3. Leviticus The Sin of Becoming a Woman: Male Homosexuality and the Castration Complex

Any attempt to delineate, explore, or analyze transgressive sexual practices in the kabbalistic tradition is fraught with seemingly insurmountable difficulties.1 As a pietistic tradition deeply invested in the normative
legal tradition, kabbalists will never (or, at least rarely) disregard prohibitions or erase transgressions. ...

4. Numbers Balaam, Moses, and the Prophecy of the “Other”: A Lurianic Vision for the Erasure of Difference

Especially since the rise of Christianity and Islam, Jews have concerned
themselves with defining the nature and fabric of the Jewish claim of
particularism1 in relation to, and as distinct from, the non-Jewish
other.2 But not only the non-Jewish other. ...

5. Deuteronomy The Human and/as God: Divine Incarnation and the “Image of God”

Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic circle constitute perhaps the most
influential component of the Hebrew Bible. Deuteronomy is a book scholars have determined represents a reformist trend in Ancient Israel taking
shape roughly around the reigns of Hezekiah and Josiah (640–609 BCE) ...

Conclusion

The initial phases of the scholarly study of Kabbala placed great emphasis
on kabbalistic myth and metaphysics and its relationship to normative
(i.e., rabbinic) Judaism. To a lesser extent, Kabbala was examined in comparative perspective, viewed as a Jewish engagement with cosmology ...

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